


On Coming Home Again

by Callmesalticidae



Series: Stories from the India War [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Future Fic, Gen, Loss, Magical Britain, Magical India, Marital Problems, Wizarding Wars, slightly AU, the India War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-05
Updated: 2014-02-05
Packaged: 2018-01-11 07:49:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1170539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Callmesalticidae/pseuds/Callmesalticidae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was a war. People fought in it. Not you. Other people. People you could forget about, even if you had to fill the hole somehow. This is how it started and how it ended, and this is how they were forgotten.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On Coming Home Again

So he comes back from the war, and he tries to pick up the pieces.

He went to old Dia the moment the call went out. They said it was going to take six months to pacify the area. The whole war had started out of anger and accidents and innocents caught in crossfires, and everyone knew that most of the native population was on the side of Empire. It was just a bunch of diehards who wouldn't let the past lie.

Eleven damn years he spent in Dia. But that's his fault, not that of the people who sent him there. They thought it was six months. He thought it was six months. Then everyone realized that the Marathas weren't going to go that easily, and it turned into seven months, and eight months, and a year, and two, and now he's come home. He could have left. But he had a responsibility.

She doesn't see it that way, all the time. She understands, mostly, but there are times, times when she realizes just how much they've missed, that she curses him and the Ministry and all of Empire. He could have come home, couldn't he? There were other people fighting. They could have done without him.

That's fine. The past can't be changed, and he just lets her vent it all out, and he makes sure to be there for when she needs something to hold onto, and he tries to make up for eleven lost years.

But it's so hard to do it.

His son was two when he left. Now the boy's thirteen and going on fourteen. The boy doesn't know this other man's face from Adam's, and the war wasn't exactly conducive to frequent exchanges of letters. Sometimes he wonders if it's already too late to try and repair things with his son and then he watches how his uncle acts with the boy, and he's pretty sure that it is too late. But it's not so terrible of a thing after all, because at least the role was filled. Boy had a father figure, that's what counts. 

He has to watch the way he talks. She doesn't say it, but he knows that she's a little bit disturbed by his tattoos. Signs and stories all, marked down so that he wouldn't forget the important things. The people he'd killed for, the people he'd failed to save, the Siege of Kochi and the poor girl who got caught by a blast meant for another man, and he never would have sent it if he'd known that she would pop out right then. He didn't even know there were noncombatants right there at the time. They'd said it was all clear, dammit. There's not a single Veteran with more than half of their skin free of ink. But they're important to him, nearly part of his life and being, so he pretends that he doesn't notice the way she sometimes looks at the tattoos.

So he watches the way he talks, at least. Because she don't know the canty, and soi it's fine he talks just a little differently, but he can't expect her to know the other words he picked up in that little tafri he spent eleven years fighting. He shifts down the gull at two in the morning, sleeps in the khota, and if she knew what it meant, she'd think him completely yeda, because he can't leave the tamasha behind some nights, and he calls a person healthy if they're thirty pounds underweight, because that was joke, back in the hell camps, joke was funny because it was true, and it's just a constant reminder that she's randi to a world she'll never be a part of, no matter how hard she tries.

So he watches the way he talks, and he tries so hard not to talk with the words he's spent eleven years using, because he doesn't want her to understand no more than barely half of the words coming out of his mouth. It's not her fault that they had to build a whole new culture out there, out of bits of what they'd brought with them and what they'd found in Dia, just to stay sane, just because they needed something they could call their own.

His hand is always at the ready, just in case there's something wrong and he needs to fire. He doesn't jump at loud noises because jumping gets you killed, but suddenly he's ready to shoot again before everything clears up, and nobody realizes that he'd just fallen back into the war for a brief moment, nobody except the other Veterans, the ones who are dealing with the same exact thing. He's always looking around, trying to hear everything, and half the time it takes the fallen look on his wife's face for him to realize that he's acting like he's still in Dia, where even being asleep in the base wouldn't mean that a fight wouldn't break out in the next instant.

He knows how she feels, even if she doesn't know it. The world has moved on without him, and it was stupid for everyone to think that they could come back and pick up where they'd left off. Eleven years, they'd lost, and now they're set adrift. He's still got a wife. How many of them lost spouses? Sometimes they were thought dead, and lots of times it just turns out that eleven years is too long for some people, and perhaps it makes it feel even worse, that those who went to Dia can't blame those who'd tried to move on, needing someone, and remarried.

Sometimes he wonders if he shouldn't have come back. Maybe he should have let her think him dead a long time ago so that she could pick up and move on. The rest of the world seems to have gone on splendidly without him, and maybe it was a stupid idea, trying to fit back into a spot that didn't need filling.


End file.
